Sex Ed. Video

I've just watched 55 minutes of slow, languorous, sensual, unwatchable, unsexy sex. I do not want to get on it, get up in it, get down with it, or get jiggy with my bad self. I have just watched 55 minutes of couples so stilted, unnatural and wooden they look as if they'd be uncomfortable riding an elevator together, let alone exploring each other's secret fantasies.

I have just spent 55 LONG minutes sequestered in my bedroom, sitting inches from my television set with the volume turned low so that my landlord, who is caulking tiles in my roommate's bathroom, will not think I'm a big shifty pervert because I'm sitting at home in the middle of the day watching a little curio titled Playboy's Best Kept Secrets and claiming it's for work. This video is less tantalizing than caulking bathroom tiles.

Of course, perhaps it's not meant to offer a cheap thrill. Perhaps it's meant to educate. The box, which shows pictures of couples embracing passionately in a variety of poses, such as on horseback and with a Popsicle, claims this to be a "sensual and elegantly produced instructional video" that "reveals techniques for sparking passion, maximizing foreplay, and giving and receiving heightened pleasure." Whatever. Common sense says this is porn.

Porn by any other name. Porn in the form of instruction. Self-righteous feel-good instructional-seeming porn that is neither instructional nor pornographic.

The video begins by showing gauzy, slow-mo, soft-lit couples embracing while a syrupy-sounding voice says that while it's easy and comfortable to do what's familiar, "you may be missing out on what can be new and stimulating in your lovemaking." Is this where the horse and Popsicle come in? Is it?

No. This is where the, um, kissing comes in. Now, see, I've heard of this thing called kissing before, but I always forget exactly what it is. I think it might be something gross, but I'm not sure. Luckily, the sappy voice-over is ready to inform: "It is said that a kiss can be a comma, an exclamation point or a question mark." Yes! Now I remember! But what about the ellipsis, surely the steamiest mark of punctuation there is? Just look at it in all its scintillating glory. . . . Now I'm getting hot! I mean, now I'm getting hot. . . .

Next up is a vignette discussing the finer points of "extended foreplay." You can even do crazy things like wear sexy lingerie or use scented massage oils or even get a "feather for tickling," which is said in a nauseating "we're so naughty" tone. In fact, this undercurrent of innocent, giggly fun keeps rearing its contrived head. In a later cheese-o-riffic vignette extolling the virtues of role-playing, a woman tells her man to "kiss my boot" and then playfully pushes his head toward her shoe. As he does this, you see her crack up and then regain her "tee-hee, this is serious business" composure before he looks up at her. The aw-shucksiness of it all makes the video even harder to watch, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

"Seduction is a game played by two, and the seducer can become the seduced in the blink of an eye," the voice says. Very, very deep. Take a few moments to digest.

The most unwatchable vignette—and there are many—is the "don't keep what pleases you to yourself" one.

A couple lies on an unkempt—we can assume post-coital—bed. The delivery of the lines is weird, forced and uneven—monotonic in parts and overly exuberant in others. Think really bad infomercial acting. Really, really bad infomercial acting.

"I like it when you're hard first thing in the morning," she tells no one in particular, though the line is supposed to be directed at her lover. I think he's supposed to look excited by this revelation, but instead his reaction is akin to that of someone who just got hit in the face with a drop of rain.

"I like the way your hair smells in the morning," he says. Then he, as is apt, picks up a piece of her hair and smells it.

"When you talk dirty to me—no one's ever done that to me before. Not the way you do it," she says in that breathy monotone. Again he looks like he just took a drop of rain in the eye.

He nods and then says he enjoys "the sound you make when you're about to come, that soft sort of whimper," and then, with a gusto normally reserved for people in potato-chip commercials, he says "Really! It's great!"

Later, as the same unfortunate couple is simulating unwatchable sex, she tells him that she likes to fantasize about being videotaped. "Then I fantasize about the tape getting lost and someone watching it. Maybe a lot of people."

Is this some sort of pretentious self-referential postmodern attempt to break through the fourth wall? How very twee.

And then I realize with a sickening thud that I actually can identify with this horrible awkward couple because I can remember those horribly awkward initial sexual experiences where you're so uncomfortable with the other person that you look any which way but directly at him or her and where you really can't get lost in the moment because you're just too entirely aware of how you seem and how you look and how you're acting and what you're saying. The sex in this vignette is the sex of people who really don't want to be having sex. Quellesexy!